When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.

The rain's innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs.

Love's pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.